Tick–tock model

Tick–tock was a production model adopted in 2007 by chip manufacturer Intel. Under this model, every new process technology was first used to manufacture a die shrink of a proven microarchitecture (tick), followed by a new microarchitecture on the now-proven process (tock). It was replaced by the process–architecture–optimization model, which was announced in 2016 and is like a tick–tock cycle followed by an optimization phase. More generally, tick–tock is an engineering model which refreshes one half of a binary system each release cycle.

History

Every "tick" represented a shrinking of the process technology of the previous microarchitecture (with minor changes, commonly to the caches, and rarely introducing new instructions, as with Broadwell in late 2014) and every "tock" designated a new microarchitecture. These occurred roughly every year to 18 months.

Due to the slowing rate of process improvements, in 2014 Intel created a "tock refresh" of a tock in the form of a smaller update to the microarchitecture not considered a new generation in and of itself. In March 2016, Intel announced in a Form 10-K report that it would always do this in future, deprecating the tick–tock cycle in favor of a three-step process–architecture–optimization model, under which three generations of processors are produced under a single manufacturing process, with the third generation out of three focusing on optimization.

After introducing the Skylake architecture on a 14 nm process in 2015, its first optimization was Kaby Lake in 2016. Intel then announced a second optimization, Coffee Lake, in 2017 making a total of four generations at 14 nm before the Palm Cove die shrink to 10 nm in 2018.